Yet since Dec 2008 the total number of articles on the English Wikipedia has risen by 50% - 2.6m to 3.9m http://stats.wikimedia.org/EN/TablesWikipediaEN.htm (and quite a few of those that existed in 2008 have since gone). Word count per article was also increasing from Dec 2008 to Jan 2010 (we don't seem to have word counts for the last couple of years).

I rather suspect that editing on Olympics related stuff is on a four year cycle, and that former Olympians may not be updated much till they die. - We pick up large numbers of sportspeople in the Death anomaly project.

Otherwise the picture is more complex.

Intrawiki links will account for some of the increase in average word count, it would be interesting to know whether articles in general tend to get longer and the proportion of new stubs that get expanded per year.

The somewhat arbitrary criteria that actually apply at new page patrol have in my experience been getting tougher, so the de facto minimum word count needed for a new article to survive is probably rather higher now than it was in 2006. This might help explain the increase in average word count per article.

There is in my view a tendency among some wikipedians to prefer to start new articles as opposed to improve existing ones, and new articles on major topics are relatively rare.

There has been a major drive to up the minimum standards for certain types of articles. This has involved a large group of editors and possibly distracted them away from articles on major topics to improve less important ones ( the unreferenced BLP project involved nearly 2% of all articles).

In a similar vein the attempts by a group of more deletionist editors to get borderline and sometimes not so borderline articles deleted has got rid of many relatively short articles, and distracted many other editors from the articles that most need work to the ones that are most in danger of deletion.

Specifically with your examples of major wars and major generals, the focus of the Milhist project in recent years on "majestic titans" the project to get a Featured Article on every Battleship is bound to have diverted some editors away from wars and generals. It has certainly influenced my editing and I'm not a member of the project or even particularly interested in the subject.

The cumulative effect of all this may well mean that once an article gets to a certain standard it can be quite stable for some years. Which might be rather reassuring to our writers. But it would be worth testing a more random group. There is also a good chance that wikiprojects effect the articles in their purview, MilHist has long been our biggest and best organised WikiProject, but generally WikiProjects have their own cycles of enthusiasm and moribundity.

I suspect we also have a difference between areas where our editors are subject matter experts and areas where they are not. Medicine is supposedly a WikiProject with an unusually high proportion of editors who are subject matter experts in real life. I couldn't single out a Wikiproject where the editors had a low level of expertise, but I'm pretty sure that MilHist has more than its fair share of teenage boys among the active editors. It would be interesting to test to see if Medicine related articles were generally more up-to-date than the average.

WereSpielChequers

On 2 May 2012 01:30, Laura Hale <laura@fanhistory.com> wrote:

On Wed, May 2, 2012 at 10:27 AM, Richard Jensen <rjensen@uic.edu> wrote:
I am looking at the edit history of a number of major articles on historical topics (in the English Wikipedia)

Sports has this as a bit of a huge problem. I've found a number of articles where they have not been updated since 2008 for Olympians and the upcoming Olympic Games where some of these athletes will compete in again have not been updated to reflect that yet.

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